RECENT REVIEWS

JUST AFTER ONE in the morning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2004, two teenage cellmates at the Preston Youth Correctional Facility in Ione, California, were found hanged from their bedframe by the...

A POWERFUL TROPE exists within the Chinese literary imagination: the scholar-hero, who speaks truth to power through his poetry and is then banished. In exile he writes from the far corners of China, ...

FOR NEARLY 10 years the hypnotic Rhapsodomancy: A Reading Series in Los Angeles has happened at the Good Luck Bar on the cusp of Hollywood and Los Feliz, every even-numbered month. Artists pour out in...

FROM TO THE LIGHTHOUSE ON, the British have produced a series of novels that address empire and its downward trajectory in the most pointed and humane terms, even if the decline is tangential or offst...

GIVEN RECENT DISCUSSIONS surrounding cultural appropriation in American culture, Your Face in Mine is a timely book. In music, 2013 marked the first year that no black artist topped the Billboard 10...

[Note: We've simultaneously published a video interview of Michelle Huneven at the LA Times Festival of Books.]
ONE NIGHT late on an early 20-something birthday, a friend and I were sappy and high-al...

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I visited Los Angeles — the first time I truly visited LA, in the same way as you visit friends, as a place where you feel at home, but not quite. I was struck by something...